Evan O'Neill Kane (December 23, 1924 – March 23, 2006), known as E. O. Kane in his publications, was an American physicist who established some of the basic understanding of the theory of

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity between that of a conductor and an insulator. Its conductivity can be modified by adding impurities (" doping") to its crystal structure. When two regions with different doping level ...

s that are now used in consumer and other electronics. He was one of the main developers of the k·p perturbation theory which is used to calculate band structures.

Ancestry

Kane's great, great uncle,

Elisha Kent Kane Elisha Kent Kane (February 3, 1820 – February 16, 1857) was a United States Navy medical officer and Arctic explorer. He served as assistant surgeon during Caleb Cushing's journey to China to negotiate the Treaty of Wangxia and in the A ...

, was an arctic explorer, writing books in the 1850s about his journeys. His great grandfather, Thomas Leiper Kane, who founded the town of

Kane, Pennsylvania Kane is a borough in McKean County in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, east by southeast of Erie. It was founded in 1864 by Civil War General Thomas L. Kane of the famous Bucktail Regiment at an elevated site 2210 feet (674 m) above sea level ...

, was an

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and the Confederate States of A ...

General. He also helped with the

Underground Railroad The Underground Railroad was an organized network of secret routes and safe houses used by freedom seekers to escape to the abolitionist Northern United States and Eastern Canada. Enslaved Africans and African Americans escaped from slavery ...

and successfully urged the Buchanan Administration not to go to war with the

Mormons Mormons are a Religious denomination, religious and ethnocultural group, cultural group related to Mormonism, the principal branch of the Latter Day Saint movement started by Joseph Smith in upstate New York during the 1820s. After Smith's d ...

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City, often shortened to Salt Lake or SLC, is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Utah. It is the county seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in the state. The city is the core of the Salt Lake Ci ...

. Kane's grandfather, also named

Evan O'Neill Kane Evan O'Neill Kane (April 6, 1861 – April 1, 1932) was an American physician and surgeon from the 1880s to the early 1930s who served as chief of surgery at Kane Summit Hospital in Kane, Pennsylvania. He was a significant contributor in his day ...

, was a doctor who was so enamoured of the idea of

local anesthesia Local anesthesia is any technique to induce the absence of sense, sensation in a specific part of the body, generally for the aim of inducing local analgesia, i.e. local insensitivity to pain, although other local senses may be affected as well. ...

that he surgically removed his own

appendix Appendix (: appendices or appendixes) may refer to: __NOTOC__ In documents * Addendum, an addition made to a document by its author after its initial printing or publication * Bibliography, a systematic list of books and other works * Index (publis ...

to show its effectiveness.

Life

Kane was born on December 23, 1924 in

. His father, Thomas Leiper Kane, died in 1933 of

pneumonia Pneumonia is an Inflammation, inflammatory condition of the lung primarily affecting the small air sacs known as Pulmonary alveolus, alveoli. Symptoms typically include some combination of Cough#Classification, productive or dry cough, ches ...

. He later moved with his mother and siblings to

Daytona Beach, Florida Daytona Beach is a coastal Resort town, resort city in Volusia County, Florida, United States. Located on the East Coast of the United States, its population was 72,647 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. It is part of the Deltona� ...

, where he stayed through high school.

Career

Kane was an undergraduate at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

, and interrupted his education to serve in the army during

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

. He graduated from

in 1948, and went directly to

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

to study towards his PhD in physics, which was awarded in 1953 on an experimental project related to

vacuum tube A vacuum tube, electron tube, thermionic valve (British usage), or tube (North America) is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric voltage, potential difference has been applied. It ...

technology. Kane then joined the

General Electric Research Laboratory General Electric Research Laboratory was the first industrial research facility in the United States. Established in 1900, the lab was home to the early technological breakthroughs of General Electric and created a research and development environ ...

in Schenectady, New York. There he began contributing to the theoretical underpinnings of the then-new field of

research. He published widely in scientific journals. Perhaps his best known paper was published in 1956 on a technique to calculate the structure of solids. This technique is referred to as the k·p method for band structure calculations. Kane left General Electric in 1959 to join

Hughes Aircraft The Hughes Aircraft Company was a major American aerospace company, aerospace and defense contractor founded on February 14, 1934 by Howard Hughes in Glendale, California, as a division of the Hughes Tool Company. The company produced the Hughes ...

in California and then moved to the Theoretical Physics Department in

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several lab ...

in Murray Hill, New Jersey in 1961. He continued his semiconductor research at Bell Labs, at the interface between experimental and theoretical physics, until

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

was broken up. He then worked for

BellCore iconectiv supplies communications providers with network planning and management services. The company’s cloud-based information as a service network and operations management and numbering solutions span trusted communications, digital identi ...

until he retired in 1984.

Personal life

Kane married Anne Bassler in 1950 in

Lancaster, Pennsylvania Lancaster ( ) is a city in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. With a population of 58,039 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, eighth-most populous ci ...

. They lived together for over 40 years in

New Providence, New Jersey New or NEW may refer to: Music * New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz * ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013 ** "New" (Paul McCartney song), 2013 * ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator, 1995 * "New" (Daya song), 2017 * "New" (No Doubt song), 1 ...

, where they raised three children and coauthored one paper. In 1974, he became ranked second in the country in the 50 and over marathon category. He spent most of the rest of his life working in childcare for infants, toddlers and young children including his grandchildren and church group. He died in 2006 at the age of 81. The cause of death was complications secondary to

myeloproliferative disease Myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs) are a group of rare blood cancers in which excess red blood cells, white blood cells or platelets are produced in the bone marrow. ''Myelo'' refers to the bone marrow, ''proliferative'' describes the rapid grow ...

and

myelodysplasia A myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) is one of a group of cancers in which blood cells in the bone marrow do not mature, and as a result, do not develop into healthy blood cells. Early on, no symptoms typically are seen. Later, symptoms may includ ...

. He had three children.

Kane model

Kane used the k·p perturbation method to determine what became known as the Kane model or Kane Hamiltonian of the structure of energy bands of semiconductors. The Kane Hamiltonian describes the

valence and conduction bands In solid-state physics, the valence band and conduction band are the bands closest to the Fermi level, and thus determine the electrical conductivity of the solid. In nonmetals, the valence band is the highest range of electron energies in ...

in sp³ bonded semiconductors: the

group A group is a number of persons or things that are located, gathered, or classed together. Groups of people * Cultural group, a group whose members share the same cultural identity * Ethnic group, a group whose members share the same ethnic iden ...

IV, III-V and II-VI semiconductors. This 1957 publication is still prominent in scientific literature and textbooks more than 50 years after its discovery (the paper has about 3377 citations despite the fact that modern

citation index A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century H ...

es undercount citations for papers published before the mid-1990s). The model is now often cited via books where it is discussed, most notably in Yu's and Cardona's book, ''Fundamentals of Semiconductors''. In their book on the k·p method, Voon and WillatzenLok C. Lew Yan Voon and Morten Willatzen, "The k.p Method" Electronic Properties of Semiconductors, Springer, Springer-Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009. devote several chapters to explaining Kane models. They note that Kane's quasi-degenerate

perturbation theory In mathematics and applied mathematics, perturbation theory comprises methods for finding an approximate solution to a problem, by starting from the exact solution of a related, simpler problem. A critical feature of the technique is a middle ...

approach worked well for semiconductors with small

band gap In solid-state physics and solid-state chemistry, a band gap, also called a bandgap or energy gap, is an energy range in a solid where no electronic states exist. In graphs of the electronic band structure of solids, the band gap refers to t ...

s. Kane improved previous valence band models by adding the lowest conduction band. This model was extended later to take into account the non-parabolicity of materials such as

gallium arsenide Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is a III-V direct band gap semiconductor with a Zincblende (crystal structure), zinc blende crystal structure. Gallium arsenide is used in the manufacture of devices such as microwave frequency integrated circuits, monoli ...

(GaAs). The model explains essentially most of the materials used in semiconductor technology. The theoretical literature describing the electronics and optical responses of these semiconductors all rely heavily on this model, as does the very active field of

quantum In physics, a quantum (: quanta) is the minimum amount of any physical entity (physical property) involved in an interaction. The fundamental notion that a property can be "quantized" is referred to as "the hypothesis of quantization". This me ...

phenomena in size-limited crystalline structures.

Selected publications

* Kane, E. O. (1956). "ENERGY BAND STRUCTURE IN P-TYPE GERMANIUM AND SILICON." Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids 1(1-2): 82-99. (cited by 721Citation statistics retrieved from

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of Academic publishing, scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in Beta release, beta in November 2004, th ...

, 28 February 2017) * Kane, E. O. (1957). "BAND STRUCTURE OF INDIUM ANTIMONIDE." Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids 1(4): 249-261. (cited by 3377) * Kane, E. O. (1959). "THE SEMI-EMPIRICAL APPROACH TO BAND STRUCTURE." Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids 8: 38-44. (cited by 28) * Kane, E. O. (1959). "ZENER TUNNELING IN SEMICONDUCTORS." Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids 12(2): 181-188. (cited by 749) * Kane, E. O. (1961). "THEORY OF TUNNELING." Journal of Applied Physics 32(1): 83-&. (cited by 778) * Kane, E. O. (1963). "THOMAS-FERMI APPROACH TO IMPURE SEMICONDUCTOR BAND STRUCTURE." Physical Review 131(1): 79-&. (cited by 691) * Kane, E. O. (1967). "ELECTRON SCATTERING BY PAIR PRODUCTION IN SILICON." Physical Review 159(3): 624-&. (cited by 481) * Chandrasekhar, M., Cardona, M. and Kane, E. O. (1977). "INTRABAND RAMAN-SCATTERING BY FREE CARRIERS IN HEAVILY DOPED N-SI." Physical Review B 16(8): 3579-3595. (cited by 66) * Kane, E. O. and A. B. Kane (1978). "DIRECT CALCULATION OF WANNIER FUNCTIONS - SI VALENCE BANDS." Physical Review B 17(6): 2691-2704. (cited by 53) * Baraff, G. A., E. O. Kane and M. Schlueter (1980). "THEORY OF THE SILICON VACANCY - AN ANDERSON NEGATIVE-U SYSTEM." Physical Review B 21(12): 5662-5686. (cited by 447)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kane, Evan O. 1924 births 2006 deaths United States Army personnel of World War II Princeton University alumni Cornell University alumni 20th-century American physicists Semiconductor physicists Scientists from Pennsylvania People from Daytona Beach, Florida People from Union County, New Jersey People of the Cold War History of science and technology in the United States United States Army soldiers Military personnel from Pennsylvania Fellows of the American Physical Society